Doctor’s Associates Inc.

OVERVIEW
In the late 1990s, despite being the leader in the submarine sandwich fast-food niche with an estimated 27 percent market share, Subway sandwich shops’ sales were flat and showed no signs of improving. That changed, however, when one of the chain’s loyal customers, an overweight Indiana University senior named Jared Fogle, took the chain’s promise of serving healthy, lowfat sandwiches to heart and went on a diet of Subway sandwiches. The ‘‘Subway Diet’’ was a success—Fogle lost 245 pounds eating the chain’s sandwiches twice a day—and Subway had a new spokesman to attract dietconscious consumers to its restaurants.
On the advice of its advertising agency, Hal Riney & Partners, Subway hired Fogle to pitch its low-fat menu options. Using Fogle’s weight-loss success story as its theme, Subway launched a $75 million advertising campaign in 2000. The first television commercial featuring him was a 30-second spot that opened by showing the pre-diet, 425-pound Fogle, followed by the trimmeddown Fogle ordering a Subway sandwich and eating it while seated on a park bench. An announcer stated, ‘‘We’re not saying this diet is right for you. You should talk to your doctor first. But it’s food for thought.’’ The campaign resonated with people looking for healthy, high-quality, low-fat alternatives to the typical fast-food choices of greasy burgers and fries. The company was careful to avoid responsibility for promoting a diet plan, however. A Subway spokeswoman told the Cincinnati Post, ‘‘We’re pleased that our low-fat sandwiches could fit into [Jared’s] meal plan, but it’s not a diet that we endorse by any means.’’ Commenting on the success of the ‘‘Jared’’ campaign, Subway said that, following Fogle’s 2000 appearance in a television advertising spot for the chain, his weight-loss success story had captured the attention and imagination of millions consumers and television viewers. Fogle subsequently starred in eight additional commercials for Subway and was the featured speaker at hundreds of public appearances.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
In 1964 people craving a submarine sandwich either made it at home or went to a local sandwich shop or Italian restaurant. That changed in 1965, when recent high school graduate Fred DeLuca, worried about finding money to pay his college tuition, talked with his family’s friend, Peter Buck. Rather than offering to pay DeLuca’s tuition, Buck had a different suggestion: he would loan the money for Fred to open a sub sandwich shop. Ten years later there were 16 Subway shops in business and one goal on DeLuca’s mind: expansion. By 2004 the chain had grown to more than 21,000 stores in 75 countries. Commenting on the growth during an interview with Advertising Age, Subway’s director of development, Don Fertman, said, ‘‘Goal-setting has always been important. Besides being No. 1 in every market we serve worldwide, our main goal was to look at what the possibilities can [lead to].’’ Beginning as early as 1989 Subway was using its menu of sandwiches made with fresh-baked bread, fresh ingredients, and low-fat meats such as turkey-based cold cuts, to promote itself as the restaurant choice for people wanting to eat healthy. In 1992 Subway added veggie and cheese and roast chicken breast sandwiches to its menu selection, further strengthening its image as the low-fat fast-food chain. Subway promoted itself through various marketing campaigns as the healthy alternative to greasy fast food. It launched its first national television campaign, ‘‘Subway—It’s My Way,’’ in 1990, and the theme ‘‘The Way a Sandwich Should Be’’ was introduced in 1996. The chain’s 1998 ‘‘Eat Smarter’’ marketing included television spots portraying overweight people in various situations, such as a clearly heavy man floating in the water behind a motorboat waiting to be towed on his skis. When his friend revved the boat’s engine the boat would not move. The camera panned to a partially eaten burger and fries while a voice-over said, ‘‘Eat less fat.’’ It was not until the 2000 campaign featuring Jared Fogle, however, that the chain’s low-fat options finally captured the attention of consumers. April Y. Pennington wrote in Advertising Age, ‘‘You can lose weight eating Subway sandwiches! everyone cried, and the rest was history.’’

TARGET MARKET
As the new millennium approached, obesity in the United States was a growing problem. According to research conducted in 2000 by the American Obesity Association, 30 percent of children aged 6 to 11 years old were overweight, and 15 percent were considered obese. The numbers for adolescents aged 12 to 19 were similar. Further, 127 million American adults were considered overweight, and 60 million were obese. One factor blamed for these statistics was high-fat, highcalorie fast food. From the mid-1980s Subway began reaching out to consumers of all ages by promoting itself as an alternative to hamburgers and fries. With Fogle as the poster boy for thin people everywhere trapped in overweight bodies, the new Subway ads focused on attracting consumers wanting to lose weight and make healthier eating choices while still having a fast meal.

COMPETITION
To help build a brand identity and lure customers away from the top two chains, Subway and Blimpie, the number three sub sandwich chain, Quiznos, launched a marketing campaign that featured the company’s cofounder, Jimmy Lambatos. ‘‘Chef Jimmy’’ used quirkiness and a grandfather-next-door approach to establish an image of quality for Quiznos. In the television ads he smiled and waved, stressing the importance of fresh, high-quality ingredients when making a good sandwich. ‘‘Chef Jimmy’’ was so passionate about making a perfect sandwich that he forgot to put on his pants. During an interview with Kelly Pate of the Denver Post, Quiznos’s chief executive officer, Rick Schaden, said that the company was counting on the personality of ‘‘Chef Jimmy’’ to drive sales and help push the restaurant into the fastcasual niche, defined as restaurants with higher-quality food than typical fast-food places. ‘‘Our next step is to take everything we do and make sure it’s in line with that,’’ Schaden explained.
Despite its distinction of being the oldest sub sandwich chain—it was founded in 1964—Blimpie International had been pushed by Quiznos from its number two spot by 2004. As the company prepared to celebrate its 40th birthday, it was struggling to reinvigorate its brand. Blimpie chief marketing officer Mark Mears said to PR Newswire that the company’s new plan was consumer focused and encouraged restaurant franchisees to treat customers ‘‘The Blimpie Way.’’ Mears explained that the new slogan ‘‘permeates all levels of the Blimpie system and will serve as the foundation for revitalizing a brand that until recently stood still and resisted change while our competitors adapted to meet the needs of today’s consumers.’’ He added, ‘‘We also plan to ‘take off the gloves’ in a new, aggressive marketing campaign.’’

MARKETING STRATEGY
Promo’s Peter Breen noted that, while Subway was a 15,000-restaurant chain worldwide with an estimated $3.2 billion in sales, it lacked the advertising budget to compete with chains like McDonald’s and Taco Bell. But he noted that Subway was ‘‘fairly confident they can compete with the big boys when it comes to offering healthier food and better service.’’ A limited budget was not enough to prevent Subway from moving ahead with the ‘‘Jared’’ campaign. Breen wrote that the chain’s marketing team was taking its healthy-alternative theme in a different direction with the introduction of an upgraded menu, a more appealing service plan, and a $75 million advertising campaign. As part of the campaign Subway dropped its four-year-old tagline, ‘‘The way a sandwich should be,’’ and replaced it with the slogan ‘‘Eat fresh.’’ The campaign included television spots featuring weightloss champion Jared Fogle as well as Billy Blanks, the creator of Tae Bo, a workout program that combined elements of karate, aerobics, boxing, and dance. While Blanks’s message reached consumers who were already exercising and living a healthy lifestyle, Jared Fogle and his weight-loss success story resonated with consumers fighting the battle of the bulge. Fogle was a student at Indiana University in 1998 when he saw Subway’s commercials promoting the chain’s ‘‘Seven under Six’’ low-fat sandwiches. Believing the promise of eating healthier food suggested in the Subway ads, Fogle, who weighed more than 400 pounds, put himself on a diet in which he ate nothing every day but a cup of coffee for breakfast, a Subway six-inch turkey sub for lunch, and a foot-long veggie sub for dinner. He also had a bag of chips and diet soda with each sandwich. One year later, helped by his diet of Subway low-fat sandwiches and a daily exercise regimen, Fogle had dropped almost half his body weight and had become Subway’s unexpected champion.
When Fogle’s weight-loss story made its way into an article in the Indiana Daily Student newspaper, word quickly spread and appeared in the national news. From there the story was picked up by Subway officials, who asked him to star in a commercial. The initial television spot portrayed the 425-pound Fogle and then switched to a shot of him, 245 pounds leaner, ordering a Subway sandwich and eating it while sitting on a park bench. Blanks became the chain’s first celebrity spokesman when his spot aired. It featured Blanks leading a Tae Bo class in a series of kicking and punching moves and telling students to head to Subway after the class for a healthy lunch. The spot included an offer giving away coupons for Blanks’s workout videos with Subway sandwich purchases. William Schettini, Subway’s chief marketing officer, told Breen, ‘‘Blanks and Fogle gave Subway a one-two kick, so to speak, with Blanks appealing to the already health-conscious and Fogle inspiring those who want to be health-conscious.’’ Chris Carroll, director of marketing for the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust, said in an interview with Promo that Subway’s marketing ultimately had to show how the chain’s products benefited the customer. He explained, ‘‘What we’ve decided to do, at least over the next 12 to 18 months, is to have our promotional message be about our products. Every piece of creative will have a promotional theme to it, but in our case, we’ve got these new sauces, we’ve got these new breads, and that becomes the promotional message, the incentive to try us out.’’

OUTCOME
The health-focused campaign was so successful that the company delayed the launch of a new $75 million branding campaign in 2000 in order to continue running the Jared Fogle and Billy Blanks spots. Subway, which had believed the low-fat theme had lost its appeal, reportedly was surprised by the success of the campaign. Carroll told Advertising Age, ‘‘We’ve been doing low-fat for 3 ½ years and did well, but driving the business 15 percent to 20 percent is unbelievable.’’ And although Subway had grown steadily since its opening in the early 1960s, the chain experienced a rapid boom following the introduction of Jared Fogle as spokesman, growing to 17,700 U.S. locations, versus 13,000 for McDonald’s by 2004. Also in 2004 Subway launched a new campaign themed ‘‘F.R.E.S.H. Steps,’’ which took aim at childhood obesity. Designed to encourage kids to strive toward a healthier lifestyle, the campaign included 11 commercials featuring Fogle and three non-actor children talking about how their lives had been changed by eating healthy food. Based on the success Fogle had connecting with consumers, both adults and children, the chain signed him on for additional advertising that was planned to continue into 2005.

TWO GUYS CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
In September 1995 Discovery Communications, Inc., made the move to the World Wide Web when it invested $10 million to launch Discovery Channel Online (Discovery.com). The new website featured news, nonfiction articles, options such as online shopping, and information about Discovery Channel’s programming. At the time of its launch, Greg Moyer, president and chief operating officer of Discovery Networks, said the company was ‘‘extremely bullish’’ about the fast-growing online medium. Within five years of its launch, 4 million users each month were logging on to Discovery.com. In February 2000 the company made the decision to take advantage of the dot-com surge and combine its Internet and other media assets into a new business unit at an investment of $500 million spread over a five-year period.
To promote its new and improved website, Discovery.com (a subsidiary of Discovery Communications) and its agency, Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, launched a national marketing campaign themed ‘‘Two Guys’’ with the tagline ‘‘Discover something new every day.’’ The campaign, part of Discovery.com’s $70 million consumer advertising budget for the year, included print ads, Web elements, and television spots that ran on the Discovery Channel and sister networks Animal Planet and the Travel Channel. The advertising featured two middleaged men poorly disguised as a variety of characters, from mosquitoes to meteors, discussing things they had learned on the Discovery.com website just before meeting an untimely and unusual demise. In a TV spot one of the mosquito men gets swatted by his victim, and in another the meteor guys both burst into flames. The campaign was a hit with consumers. Following its June 2000 launch the number of users visiting the Discovery.com website increased one percentage point (based on the number of people using the Internet at any particular moment). Although the ads resonated with consumers, in August, at the end of its preplanned summer run and without comment from Discovery.com, the campaign was canceled.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Discovery Communications launched the cable network Discovery Channel in June 1985 with 156,000 subscribers. As it grew Discovery Communications continued to add networks and subscribers, and in 2000 the company listed Animal Planet, the Travel Channel, BBC America, and the Learning Channel among its cable network holdings. In addition the company had begun to expand internationally into countries that included Latin America and Asia. Total subscribers for its combined networks had reached 269 million households by 2000. As part of its expansion, Discovery Communications in 1995 invested $10 million in a new venture and launched its website, Discovery.com. In 2000 the company expanded the Discovery.com website and developed it as a new wholly owned subsidiary with a planned financial investment of $500 million spread over a fiveyear period. While the investment in the project seemed huge, Gary Alden, principal analyst of Arlen Communications, told Broadcasting & Cable, ‘‘Five hundred million is not that much money in Internet terms. It’s a traditional media company in the era of Time Warner–
AOL doing what it has to do to launch new kinds of businesses.’’
The reinvented website combined the resources of all of Discovery Communications’ networks into one location on the Internet. It also offered users E-mail and messaging features and included plans to add options such as ‘‘Discovery Be-There Adventures’’ using advanced video technology. The company described Discovery.com as a ‘‘super-vertical’’ website that offered users information about travel, lifestyle, health, animals, kids, and other topics. Discovery Communications chairman and chief executive officer John Hendricks said of the new venture, ‘‘We’re layering on a very successful online service,’’ and he explained various possible options to help finance the project, including an IPO or existing shareholders’ investments.
To promote Discovery.com and to encourage people browsing the Internet to visit the site, Discovery Communications planned to increase the site’s on-air advertising by 200 percent. Shortly after the upgraded website’s introduction, Discovery Communications launched its ‘‘Two Guys’’ marketing campaign.
TARGET MARKET
Discovery Communications had built a following of 180 million total subscribers familiar with its offerings of ‘‘nonfiction entertainment’’ from nature documentaries to informational programming airing on its various networks. The mission of the ‘‘Two Guys’’ campaign was to attract Discovery’s traditional viewers to its upgraded and relaunched website and to encourage younger audiences connected to the Internet to visit the site when searching for information on a broad range of topics from travel destinations to health-care questions. Using over-the-top humor and what PR Newswire described as a ‘‘hip, popsavvy attitude,’’ the campaign was designed to reach consumers across all age demographics and show them they could find information relevant to their day-to-day lives on Discovery.com in each of seven categories: health, discoveries, lifestyle, travel, school, animals, and kids. According to Adweek Western Advertising News, Discovery.com executives explained, ‘‘The campaign is built on the traditional Discovery brand, but tries to play to a younger consumer with an offbeat sense of humor.’’

COMPETITION
In 2000 the National Geographic Society was an icon more than 100 years old. Besides publishing its namesake magazine, through its wholly owned subsidiary National Geographic Ventures, the society had established a presence on television with its cable network, National Geographic Channel US, listing 25 million households as subscribers, and on the Internet with its website, nationalgeographic.com. As Discovery.com was making changes to its website, National Geographic announced efforts to expand its presence on the Internet as well, but rather than revamping its existing site the company formed alliances with two existing companies having websites: Novica.com and iExplore.com. Novica.com was an online marketplace that specialized in selling handcrafted works from artisans in developing countries. According to a report in Business Wire, the terms of the alliance gave National Geographic a 19 percent share in the dot-com, with rights to increase that to almost 30 percent. Rick Allen, president and chief executive officer of National Geographic Ventures, told Business Wire, ‘‘For more than a century National Geographic has enabled hundreds of millions of people to travel to the far corners of the globe—at least from their armchairs. Novica makes it easy for individuals to experience another culture through its art.’’ For those who preferred to leave their armchairs at home, National Geographic in 2000 also acquired a 30 percent share in iExplore.com, an online resource for adventure travel. National Geographic added iExplore.com’s database of some 5,000 trips to 152 countries to its website, and iExplore.com added National Geographic Expeditions to it site. A&E Television Networks, with 80 million total subscriber households in 2000, also announced plans to increase its Internet offerings. In addition to having websites (including AandE.com, historychannel.com, and biography.com) tied to its various cable channels, one proposed site (wildlifestories.com) was developed to compete directly with Discovery Communications’ website, Discovery.com, according to Todd Tarpley, vice president of A&E’s interactive unit, as reported in Multichannel News. Additionally the company launched an updated version of its most popular site, historychannel. com, which attracted more than one-third of the combined 1.1 million people using the company’s six sites.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Cable subscribers who regularly tuned in to the Discovery Channel were familiar with the network’s unique documentaries that included up-close-and-personal views of wildlife, from the common to the rare, as well as other nonfiction programming on a variety of topics. Discovery Communications’ challenge was attracting those television viewers to its upgraded and relaunched website, Discovery.com. To encourage its viewing audience to join the 4 million people visiting its site each month, Discovery.com and its agency, Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, launched the ‘‘Two Guys’’ campaign with the tagline ‘‘Discover something new every day.’’ The national campaign, part of Discovery.com’s overall $70 million advertising budget, kicked off in June and included print ads in magazines and newspapers, television spots running on Discovery Communications’ various cable networks, and Web elements. Tim Maleeny, senior vice president and account director with Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, described the campaign as raw, bold, and edgy. ‘‘We thought it was time to use humor to present the Discovery brand from a different perspective,’’ he told Adweek Western Advertising News. Television spots featured shots of bugs, animals, and other things found in nature that Discovery Channel viewers expected but with a twist: the parts were played by two guys in bad disguises. One ad showed the guys, dressed as mosquitoes, land on someone’s arm. The mosquito men discuss Discovery.com’s many positive qualities while sucking up the victim’s blood through straws. In true mosquito fashion, one of the insects is squashed by a well-placed smack from the victim. Another spot had the two guys dressed as meteors sharing information they found on Discovery.com. Just as one meteor guy comments that he learned meteors burn up in the earth’s atmosphere, the camera zooms in to show the two guys burst into flames.

OUTCOME
The ‘‘Two Guys’’ campaign was a success if measured by consumer response. According to Broadcasting & Cable, Discovery.com’s user traffic, which was estimated at 4 million online visits per month prior to the campaign, increased by a full percentage point based on the percentage of all people using the Internet at any point in time. Despite the campaign’s popularity with consumers and the increased site visits generated by the television spots and print ads, Discovery.com, without comment, canceled the entire campaign at the end of its preplanned summer-only run.

(BECOME A DIRECTV FAN NOW) CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
In June 2003 the DirecTV Group, Inc., provider of satellite television, launched a new marketing campaign featuring commercials with A-list Hollywood actors giving dramatic readings of actual fan letters received by the client. The use of celebrities was intended to help elevate DirecTV above its competition: cable television providers and direct-broadcast satellite rival Dish Network, both of which had begun imitating DirecTV’s successful commercials featuring Dan the installer.
Developed by ad agency Deutsch/LA, the new $100 million-plus campaign consisted primarily of TV spots, which included such actors as Joan Cusack, Danny DeVito, Robert Duvall, Laurence Fishburne, and Andy Garcia. Comedian Dennis Miller anchored radio spots, and a print ad was introduced featuring a picture of actor Dennis Hopper. The TV spots were shot against a bare background with nothing more than a stool. What made them powerful was the enthusiasm of the customers’ letters and the ability of veteran actors to read the letters with equal conviction. The atmosphere was kept lighthearted, resulting in impromptu remarks that found their way into the commercials. In one, for example, DeVito, following his rant called ‘‘Lies,’’ asked the crew in a joking manner, ‘‘Did I capture the guy’s anger?’’ ‘‘Celebrities Read Fan Mail to DirecTV (Become a DirecTV Fan Now)’’ lasted little more than a year, ending in July 2004. While it proved a boon to DirecTV, which enjoyed four straight quarters of increased subscribers, the same could not be said of Deutsch. Despite its good work and excellent relationship with DirecTV’s marketing people, the agency lost the account even before the campaign closed.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Deutsch/LA established its relationship with DirecTV in 2000 when it won a creative project for Sunday Ticket, the exclusive National Football League package of Sunday games. Deutsch won the entire creative account later in the year when DirecTV put up its business for review. With just under 9 million subscribers, DirecTV was the dominant player in its category but, after a solid run of several years, it had become engaged in a fight for survival, threatened on one side by rival satellite providers and on the other by digital cable. In the fall of 2000 DirecTV ran the first television commercials developed by Deutsch. Centered around Dan the DirecTV installer, these commercials became the focal point of DirecTV’s marketing campaign for the next year and a half. While successful, the installer campaign led some viewers to mistake DirecTV for a hardware company. The installer concept grew even less attractive when Dish Network and cable companies began using installers in their own ads.
With the installer becoming everybody’s spokesperson of the moment, DirecTV felt that the waters had been muddied and its brand diminished in the process. The company believed it was imperative that DirecTV launch a new marketing campaign that would not only reinforce its position as an entertainment company but also reassert its leadership position and restore some luster to the brand.

TARGET MARKET
In the campaign that would succeed Dan the installer, DirecTV targeted existing customers, hoping to keep them on board. The company also wanted to appeal to potential new subscribers, especially ones with higher levels of disposable income, people who were not only attracted to premium brands but also likely to purchase DirecTV’s higher-end programming combinations, payper-view events, and high-margin sports packages. To achieve that end DirecTV asked Deutsch/LA to create a campaign that leveraged the influence of celebrities.

COMPETITION
DirecTV faced entrenched competition from cable television systems (whether mom-and-pop operations or larger systems) around the country, but none could match the number of channels and digital picture and sound quality that DirecTV had to offer. Early on DirecTV faced satellite competition from PrimeStar, but after DirecTV swallowed PrimeStar’s 2.2 million subscribers in 1999, that left only Echostar’s Dish Network. Because the satellite dish and receivers were manufactured by Echostar, Dish Network was able to offer lower programming costs as well as lower equipment prices, making it a formidable foe.
By 2000 DirecTV and Dish Network battled each other but also received stiffer competition from cable operators, who began rolling out their own digital packages that not only rivaled the quantity of channels found on direct broadcast satellite systems but also offered movies on demand, high-speed Internet access, and Internet phone service as well. And on the horizon was another satellite provider, VOOM (owned by a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corporation), slated for a 2004 launch. VOOM eventually positioned itself as a high-definition television service, but it never caught on and ceased operations in April 2005. Nevertheless, in the early 2000s VOOM, backed by Cablevision’s deep pockets, was not a venture DirecTV could afford to take lightly.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Since taking over the DirecTV account, the Deutsch/LA creative team had become aware of the client’s unusual fan mail—mostly handwritten, usually quirky, generally humorous, and incessantly enthusiastic about DirecTV’s service, especially when compared to cable, which the writers skewered with a passion. In fact, DirecTV executives adorned their walls with their favorite letters. After DirecTV requested a campaign that featured celebrities, the Deutsch team began sampling the letters, which the agency had already used in a small way on the DirecTV website in promoting Sunday Ticket. Although the team was attempting only to get a feel for DirecTV subscribers, it soon became apparent that the fan letters were a treasure trove of material. ‘‘It was stuff you couldn’t make up,’’ Mark Musto, a Deutsch creative director, told Shoot. ‘‘We kept saying to ourselves, ‘If there is a way we can get this passion and emotion into our TV commercials, we’d be in a great place.’ So then we started kicking around the notion of getting big Hollywood actors to present these letters.’’
The creative team selected a pool of letters, all of which possessed ‘‘that special something that set the letter apart—whether it was a quirkiness or a passion or something that was real human that you could hang your hat on,’’ Musto recalled. Then the team began the laborious task of tracking down the letter writers and securing permissions. People who agreed to allow their letters to be read were given a $500 thank-you. In several cases, however, a favorite letter had to be discarded when the writer balked. While the agency secured the permissions, a director, Baker Smith of Harvest Productions, was hired.
The team had no interest in simply impressing consumers with how big a name it could buy to endorse DirecTV. Rather, the goal was to match the material to a specific actor, to deal with emotions that everyone could connect with while hopefully establishing a relationship between the audience and the celebrity. Securing the kind of A-list Hollywood talent DirecTV and Deutsch had in mind presented a challenge, however. While actors at this level might lend their voices to commercials or accept a paycheck for pitching a product in Japan, they avoided showing themselves in U.S. television commercials in the belief that overexposure might tarnish their star power. A wish list of actors was developed, and feelers were made through their agents—but only with money on the table. The first group of actors to sign on were DeVito, Fishburne, and Garcia. Another element in the campaign, a kicker, was that the actors were also DirecTV customers, although, in truth, DirecTV was ready to make them customers if necessary.
Initially the commercials were to be shot on an ornate set in the Culver Studios in Culver City, California. As the day of production neared, however, the soundstage was stripped down, finally consisting of nothing more than a glossy black floor, a blue background, a stool, and a simple spotlight. The creative team began to worry that by taking such a minimalist approach the commercials might fail to engage the audience. But as soon as the actors stepped into the spotlight and began performing the letters—quickly demonstrating to everyone assembled why they became stars in the first place—it became apparent that in terms of production value less was definitely more. The sparse set actually accentuated the power of the actor and the passion of the letter writer.
Each actor was given three letters for filming, one of which was in keeping with a familiar persona and others that might even go against type. Smith intentionally kept the atmosphere loose to make the crew into a ready audience to help draw out a performance. As a result the actors were willing to take chances and try out a number of deliveries. Smith told Boards Magazine about his experience directing Fishburne: ‘‘I didn’t know Laurence from a hole in the ground, but I’d give him simple suggestions like, ‘Try reading the letter as if you’re a 17-year-old surfer dude,’ and this 40-year-old black guy turned into a 17-year-old white surfer. I watched the transformation. Then we read like Shakespeare and Orson Welles, got way fucking serious, and again the body language changed.’’ In the end Fishburne used a Shakespearean delivery for a letter that read, ‘‘Dear DirecTV, This morning I turned on the telly and all I can say is jumpin’ ja hos se fat! Yee haw!’’ For his spot DeVito performed a letter the team called ‘‘Lies,’’ in which he delivered a passionate screed:
‘‘Dear DirecTV, Cable says reception quality is poor with satellite TV. Lies! My reception is way better with DirecTV than it ever was with cable!’’ Garcia’s spot, ‘‘Even Greater Than Greatest,’’ was intense but a shade quieter than the others: ‘‘Dear DirecTV, There’s not a word to describe how great DirecTV is. It’s not great. It’s not greater than great. It’s even greater than greatest.’’ The convivial atmosphere on the set also elicited some off-the-cuff remarks from the actors as they slipped out of character, such as DeVito quipping, ‘‘Did I capture the guy’s anger?’’; Fishburne wondering, ‘‘How was that? Was that too over the top?’’; and Garcia remarking to the letter writer, ‘‘I think I’m going to have you write my next review.’’ These comments then served as taglines to close the commercials.
The first three 30-second commercials began airing in June 2003, presented in letterbox format with the name of the actor and writer appearing in subtitles. ‘‘Celebrities Read Fan Mail to DirecTV’’ also included radio and print elements. The radio spot used Miller, who read a letter from a customer expressing her joy about calling her former cable company to say, ‘‘Please disconnect my cable.’’ The print ad showed 21 faces of DirecTV customers and fans, one of which was Hopper. Joining the campaign in September 2003, actor John Goodman cut a television commercial to promote Sunday Ticket. He read a letter from a satisfied Indianapolis Colts fan.
In March 2004 DirecTV and Deutsch launched a second phase of the campaign, which ran until July 2004. It featured television commercials by Cusack and Duvall. Cusack offered a screwball interpretation of a letter written by a fan in love with the word ‘‘great.’’ Duvall, adopting the tone of a proper Southern gentleman, pondered the qualities of a DirecTV customer service representative that he longed to see in his wife.

OUTCOME
‘‘Celebrities Read Fan Mail to DirecTV’’ was considered a success by DirecTV, which signed up new customers at a healthy pace during the course of the campaign. But even before the second leg kicked off, DirecTV elected to sever its relationship with Deutsch/LA. The company hired a new executive vice president of marketing, Neal Tiles, who decided to consolidate the DirecTV account with agencies owned by Omnicom Group, including BBDO Worldwide, which took over the Deutsch business. BBDO had recently hired executive creative director Eric Silver, who had previously worked with Tiles. Deutsch managing partner Eric Hirshberg told Adweek, ‘‘I look back on our four years with DirecTV as a satisfying client-agency relationship . . . It was a good run.’’

Raise Your Right Hand Campaign

OVERVIEW
The Diamond Trading Company (DTC), the Londonbased marketing subsidiary of the international diamond company De Beers SA, had earned a reputation for its success at creating buzz for diamond jewelry and reaching untapped consumer niches to help expand the sale of diamonds. With its promotion of eternity rings, diamond tennis bracelets, and three-stone anniversary jewelry, DTC’s advertising resonated in particular with American consumers. According to the trade organization Jewelers of America, in 2000 retail sales of diamonds in the United States reached record levels, accounting for more that half of the $57.5 billion in retail diamond sales worldwide. Always watching for ways to introduce classic diamond jewelry to new market niches, in 2003 DTC introduced the right-hand ring.
With the support of its longtime advertising agency, New York–based J. Walter Thompson, the right-hand ring was introduced with a multimillion-dollar campaign that sent the message that diamond rings were no longer just for engagements and weddings. Themed ‘‘Raise Your Right Hand,’’ the campaign featured print ads in fashion magazines and targeted baby-boomer women with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more. Ads included photos of fashion models dressed in evening clothes showing off the rings; the copy declared, ‘‘Your left hand says ‘we.’ Your right hand says ‘me.’ ’’ Women were encouraged to change their way of thinking about diamond rings. Not only could women wear them to express their individual style, but they could buy the rings for themselves rather than waiting to get a diamond as a token of a man’s love. The campaign was a success. It was awarded a Gold EFFIE Award in 2005 for, among other things, achieving 39 percent awareness of the right-hand ring in the year following the introduction of the campaign. In addition, the campaign helped boost diamond-ring sales in the nonbridal categories by 15 percent in the year after its launch. In 2005 the ads were revamped to depict ‘‘women next door’’ wearing the rings, and the Diamond Trading Company’s U.S. marketing arm, Diamond Promotion Service, partnered with the Internet retailer Jewelry.com to promote October as ‘‘Right-Hand-Ring Month.’’

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Since its beginnings in 1888 as a South African diamondmining operation developed by the Oppenheimer family, De Beers SA had grown to a conglomerate as multifaceted as the gems it mined. To establish a market and build social status for the diamonds it was mining, in the 1930s De Beers turned to Hollywood, draping stars and starlets in diamond jewelry for photo opportunities. Also at that time De Beers created the Diamond Trading Company to serve as its London-based sales and marketing arm. By the 1940s the company was emphasizing the link between diamonds and romance. Its advertisements encouraged men to shower their significant others with diamonds set in rings, necklaces, and other jewelry as a symbol of their undying love. In 1947 De Beers’s ad agency introduced ‘‘A diamond is forever,’’ a slogan that lasted for almost 60 years.
To promote the diamond engagement ring in Brazil, Germany, and Japan, in 1967 De Beers hired New York–based advertising agency J. Walter Thompson to develop an ad campaign. The campaign, which portrayed the diamond ring as a symbol of love, was only moderately successful in Brazil and Germany, but it was a hit in Japan. By 1981 more than 60 percent of the brides in Japan were receiving a diamond ring as a symbol of engagement. The professional relationship between De Beers and the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency was a success, too. The Diamond Trading Company’s U.S. marketing arm, Diamond Promotion Service, was a division of J. Walter Thompson, and its public-relations side, the Diamond Information Center, maintained an office in J. Walter Thompson’s New York offices. De Beers created new outlets for its diamonds and joined the list of diamond retailers in late 2000 when it joined forces with luxury-goods company LVMH Moe¨t Hennessy Louis Vuitton to create a new retail jewelry brand. Women’s Wear Daily reported that the two companies planned to invest $400 million over a five-year period in the venture, with the first store, named De Beers, to open in London. At that time the De Beers name became the sole property of LVMH; all subsequent generic diamond advertising by De Beers would feature the company’s new ‘‘Forever’’ trademark, and marketing would fall under the banner of the Diamond Trading Company.

TARGET MARKET
Since stepping in as the sales and marketing arm of De Beers SA in 2000, the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) had shown a flair for building interest in and driving sales of fine diamond jewelry. In early 2001 the DTC told upscale women that a diamond tennis bracelet, a classic design in which a single line of diamonds encircled the wrist, was the perfect piece of jewelry to complete any fashionable outfit, and women listened. Following the terrorist attacks on September 11 of that year, fashion jewelry such as diamond tennis bracelets fell from favor, but the DTC reintroduced the three-stone diamond anniversary ring in a two-part campaign. The first part targeted men, encouraging them to buy the rings as symbols of the past, present, and future of a relationship. The second, aimed at women, promoted three-stone diamond earrings and necklaces as a way for a woman to celebrate life with her significant other. The challenge of bringing back to the fashion forefront the outdated cocktail rings buried at the bottom of women’s jewelry boxes led to creation of the so-called ‘‘right-hand ring.’’ But the right-hand ring also provided an opportunity to reach a previously untargeted niche of nearly 77 million people: 45- to 65-year-old professional women, both married and single, with household incomes of $100,000 and up. ‘‘This woman knows herself, she’s proud. . . . She reflects her confident style through a luxury purchase,’’ Lynn Diamond told Israel Diamonds magazine. Diamond, the managing director of Diamond Promotion Services, the United States division of the DTC, said that the right-hand ring created a category for, and gave meaning to, diamond rings not classified as engagement, bridal, or anniversary jewelry and encouraged women to buy the rings for themselves as a way to express their personal style.

COMPETITION
Although De Beers supplied more than half of the market’s rough diamonds, two other companies vied with De Beers for market share: BHP Billiton, with headquarters in Melbourne, Australia (BHP Billiton Limited), and London (BHP Billiton Plc); and Aber Diamond Corp. of Toronto, Ontario. Both companies produced diamonds in the rough, and both also pursued relationships with highend retailers to create branding, marketing, and consumer sales outlets for their gems.
Aber directly supplied diamonds to high-end jewelry retailer Tiffany & Company Then in a twist, in 1999 Tiffany purchased almost 15 percent of Aber at a cost of $71 million in order to assure a steady supply of quality diamonds for its jewelry. According to Jewelers Circular Keystone, while it was not uncommon for miners like Aber and De Beer to turn retailer, Tiffany’s acquisition of a percentage of Aber was the first time a jewelry retailer had turned miner. In what was considered more the norm, in 2004 Aber acquired 51 percent of jeweler Harry Winston for $85 million. With its purchase of a share of Harry Winston, one of the leading retail jewelers to the rich and famous since 1932, Aber developed a broader presence in the diamond industry, eliminated the middleman for its diamond sales, and gained a foothold in the profitable U.S. market.
BHP Billiton, the largest diversified natural-resources business in the world, reported that diamonds were both its smallest business unit and its fastest-growing one. Following the 2001 merger of Australia-based BHP Limited and London-based Billiton Plc, the company seemed to be on a mission to increase its diamond assets and involvement in the diamond industry. The heart of the company’s diamond business was the Ekati mine in Canada, which accounted for approximately 6 percent of the world’s rough diamond production in 2000. To brand polished diamonds from Ekati, in 2000 the company created Aurius Diamonds, a marketing division based in Australia. By 2001, following the introduction of Aurius, sales had doubled monthly in Australia, producing $393 million in sales. In 2003 BHP Billiton announced plans to offer the Aurius brand in retail stores in the United States, Canada, and Singapore in addition to Australia.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Following the success of its three-stone-jewelry campaign, which promoted rings, earrings, and necklaces as symbols of love and enduring relationships, in 2003 the Diamond Trading Company launched a new campaign to sell not just diamond rings, but an idea. Working with its ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, DTC introduced the right-hand ring and through clever marketing launched a fashion trend. Additionally, the campaign reached a previously unmarketed-to demographic: independent, financially well-off, older women. Unlike previous campaigns that portrayed the diamond ring as a symbol of love, the ‘‘Raise Your Right Hand’’ campaign promoted the diamond ring as a badge of individual style. Claudia Rose, director of marketing strategy at J. Walter Thompson, said that the right-hand ring campaign was different because it linked diamond rings to fashion rather than romance. ‘‘This gives women another message,’’ Rose said. ‘‘Diamonds also can represent a woman’s unique style and be expressive as something like their favorite leather goods.’’
For the multimillion-dollar campaign, J. Walter Thompson developed a series of print ads that ran in fashion magazines, including Elle, Vogue, and In Style. Ads also appeared in publications likely to be read by the target demographic—upper-middle-class women 45 to 65 years old—such as Conde´ Nast Traveler and Town and Country. In developing the ads J. Walter Thompson used fashion models younger than the women being targeted. Explaining the strategy, Diamond Promotion Service, De Beers’s U.S. marketing arm and a division of the J. Walter Thompson agency, said that regardless of their own ages, women identified more readily with younger women in print ads. The ads had edgy, eveningwear-clad fashion models showing off right-hand rings Each ad also featured a significant message to distinguish the right-hand ring from the engagement and wedding ring worn on the left hand. Among the statements were:
‘‘Your left hand says ‘we.’ Your right hand says ‘me,’ ’’ ‘‘Your left hand likes to be held. Your right likes to be held high,’’ ‘‘Your left hand is your heart. Your right hand is your voice,’’ and ‘‘Your left hand lives for love. Your right hand lives for the moment.’’ Each ad included the tagline ‘‘Women of the world, raise your right hand.’’ By the end of the year the print campaign was expanded to include television spots.
Jewelry designers were encouraged to develop rings that matched De Beers’s prototype right-hand rings, which were trendy and fashion-conscious To avoid being confused with traditional diamond engagement and wedding rings or with the popular three-stone anniversary rings, right-hand rings had one diamond of 20 points or larger and as many additional smaller diamonds as desired as long as it was not limited to three. A report in Israel Diamonds noted that more than 300 designs were submitted by manufacturers hoping to be a part of the campaign. From the original submittals, 10 ring designs were selected. An additional 6 ring designs were commissioned by Diamond Promotion Services, resulting in the 16 rings that were featured in the ads.

OUTCOME
The ‘‘Raise Your Right Hand’’ campaign was a marketing success for the Diamond Trading Company. Prior to the campaign’s launch, diamond-ring sales were at the low end of the diamond-jewelry market, representing 28 percent of diamond jewelry, or $3.3 billion in sales, in 2003. Following the introduction of ‘‘Raise Your Right Hand,’’ in 2004 nonbridal ring sales increased 15 percent. The campaign also created a cultural phenomenon by convincing single women that they could have a diamond ring without an engagement or in addition to a bridal set. And while the campaign originally targeted women with household incomes of $100,000 or more, right-hand rings soon were available at stores from Costco and Wal-Mart to Tiffany & Company and ranged in price from a couple hundred dollars to several thousand. Besides appearing on the right hands of stars such as Cameron Diaz, Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, and the female cast members of Sex and the City, women in all income brackets were soon sporting the rings. Clothing designers such as Betsey Johnson and Zac Posen, recognizing a growing trend, paired right-hand rings with their 2004 spring ready-to-wear styles. In 2005 the campaign garnered a Gold EFFIE Award from the New York American Marketing Association for ‘‘exceeding its objectives of bringing ring growth into line with total diamond jewelry growth.’’ The campaign was also recognized for pushing single women into the diamond-jewelry-buying market and achieving 39 percent product awareness among consumers in the year following its launch. Also in 2005 the DTC revamped the campaign, introducing new ads that were similar to the original but with a softer and less fashion-forward tone, replacing hard-edged fashion models with women dressed in cardigans. The right-hand ring category was broadened as well to include almost any ring that allowed women to express their individual identities. To further encourage women to raise their suitably adorned right hands, Diamond Promotion Services, the DTC’s U.S. marketing arm, partnered with Jewelry.com, the premiere Internet jewelry site, and named October ‘‘Right-Hand Ring Month.’’

EMERALD NUTS MARKETING CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
In 2004 Diamond Foods, Inc., a company known for producing culinary nuts, created a high-quality selection of snack nuts called Emerald Nuts, which came in packaging that fit automobile cup-holders. The canister lids measured out 1.5-ounce servings. To create national brand recognition and to move away from its image as making nuts that were only for cooking, Diamond released its ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign’’ in early 2004. The ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign,’’ created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, appeared in print, Internet, and television formats. The agency created 15 television commercials that all played on the initials ‘‘E.N.’’ The first two spots, ‘‘Encouraging Norwegians’’ and ‘‘Exercising Newscasters,’’ aired in Northern California markets during the 2004 Super Bowl. ‘‘Encouraging Norwegians’’ showed a portly Norwegian man standing next to a bull’s-eye target while someone off camera fired arrows at it. The man gave encouragement, such as ‘‘Good shot,’’ while snacking on Emerald Nuts. The spot ended with a voice-over stating, ‘‘Encouraging Norwegians love Emerald Nuts.’’ Diamond spent an estimated $9.9 million on advertising during the first 10 months of 2004.
The campaign’s bottom-line success was measured in July 2004, when Diamond reported an annual net revenue of $350 million, which was $50 million above the previous year. In a daring move Diamond gambled almost the entirety of its advertising budget to air a 30-second spot (which diverged from the ‘‘E.N.’’ theme) during the 2005 Super Bowl. ‘‘We can buy one spot, and we can make one ad for that one spot,’’ Sandra McBride, Emerald’s vice president of marketing, told the Boston Globe. The gamble paid off when Diamond sales grew 56.3 percent during the three months following the game. The ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign’’ also garnered a gold EFFIE in 2005.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Diamond, an established brand in California since 1912, was owned by more than 1,800 growers at the start of 2004. This farmers’ cooperative, doing business as Diamond, led the world in culinary walnut production and in-shell walnuts. Diamond paid nut growers 3.5 cents a pound over the industry average, which was 1.8 cents a pound. In January 2004 the cooperative took a stab at the burgeoning snack-nut market by creating Emerald Nuts, a brand that offered nuts in exotic flavors, curvy containers, and larger sizes, with fewer peanuts in the assorted packages. The snack-nut sector only had one major player, Planters Nuts, one of the many brands owned by Kraft Foods. Besides taking advantage of a sector with only one main competitor, Emerald Nuts were intended to capitalize on the popularity of the Atkins diet, a high-protein and low-carbohydrate weight-loss plan that encouraged nut consumption. Further, the nut sector reported 12.7 percent growth in 2004. Analysts attributed this sharp rise to a heightened demand for high-protein foods and to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s announcement that nuts reduced heart disease. ‘‘What we’re doing with Emerald Nuts is building a new consumer franchise over in the snack-nut aisle,’’ McBride told the Stockton Record Previously Diamond products had been located solely in supermarkets’ baking aisles. One of the greatest challenges for the ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign’’ was successfully introducing the public to an unheard-of brand. ‘‘It does cost somewhere between 20 and 30 million dollars to build a brand name,’’ Suzanne Walchli, an assistant professor of marketing at University of the Pacific, explained to the Record. ‘‘It’s rather difficult to break even on a brand in the first year.’’
The advertising climate during the period between the 2004 and the 2005 Super Bowls welcomed the innocent silliness of Emerald Nuts’ branding. When Janet Jackson’s wardrobe ‘‘malfunctioned’’ during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and exposed her breast, more than 500,000 complaints poured into the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In response the FCC instituted massive censorship restrictions across most media channels. Therefore the climate for 2005’s Super Bowl, the one that Diamond poured a majority of its Emerald Nuts advertising budget into, was increasingly sensitive. ‘‘Everybody was paying more attention this year,’’ McBride told the Record. ‘‘That attention was good for Emerald.’’

TARGET MARKET
The ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign’’ targeted 25-to 45-year-old males and females. Surveys showed that faster-paced Americans were drifting away from traditional sit-down meals. ‘‘In a survey last month, we found that more than 62 percent of adults polled admit to replacing a meal with a snack at least once per week,’’ Michael J. Mendes, Diamond’s president, said in an interview with Business Wire. ‘‘We want to convey the message to general consumers, and professional or armchair Olympic athletes, that not all nuts are created equal. Emerald sets a higher standard in snacking, providing a quality alternative to less healthy snacking options.’’
Sports enthusiasts were continuously targeted during the 2004 leg of the campaign. After the 2004 Super Bowl, 15-second television spots were shown during the Athens Summer Olympics and then during the World Series. The 30-second spot that aired during the 2005 Super Bowl was viewed by 89.2 million people and ranked as one of the campaign’s greatest expenditures. ‘‘Even at a rate of $2.4 million for 30 seconds of air time, advertisers said, the Super Bowl is among the cheapest advertising available when you factor in the cost per eyeball,’’ according to Naomi Aoki, a writer for the Boston Globe. A survey conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, a strategic communications firm, determined that the majority of Super Bowl viewers would rather miss the actual game than the Super Bowl’s commercials.

COMPETITION
Nabisco Holdings Corp. owned Planters Nuts until Kraft purchased Nabisco in 2000. Up until 2004 Planters was the only nationally branded snack nut and dominated supermarket’s snack-nut aisles. ‘‘Planters is like the Big Brother of salty snacks. We had to come up with creative that stood out, was fun and that just sticks with you beyond 15 seconds,’’ Jeff Goodby, the Goodby, Silverstein & Partners cochairman who helped formulate the Emerald Nuts campaign, explained to Brandweek. In 2003 ad agency Foote Cone & Belding created commercials for Planters that depicted the brand’s mascot, Mr. Peanut, dancing to disco music in one spot and breakdancing in another. Using computer-generated imagery, other Mr. Peanut commercials showed Mr. Peanut’s life as a young legume. Baby Mr. Peanut was shown receiving his first monocle, despite being an infant, followed by his first hat and cane. The spot was an attempt to ‘‘contemporize’’ the brand and spin the mythology behind Mr. Peanut. Commercials released closer to Christmas showed Mr. Peanut with Santa Claus and a reindeer. Up until 2004 Planters had packaged its nuts inside cans and bags. A few months after Emerald Nuts introduced its sleekly packaged nuts, however, Planters released its own range of multiflavored peanuts called Nutcases, which came sealed in reusable, brightly colored pots. Flavors included sour cream and jalapen˜o. Rob Woodall, marketing director at Trigon Foods, the primary manufacturer of Planters products, told Brand Republic, ‘‘The opportunity was to create a lighter-eating nut-snack, which would appeal to a younger audience.’’

MARKETING STRATEGY
Two 15-second television spots, ‘‘Encouraging Norwegians’’ and ‘‘Exercising Newscasters,’’ kicked off the ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign’’ during the 2004 Super Bowl. The first containers of Emerald Nuts had been released only a few weeks prior, and only in Northern California supermarkets. Because of the brand’s limited availability, the Super Bowl spots only aired in Northern California. After Diamond increased the range of Emerald Nuts’ distribution, nationwide spots began airing during the Athens Summer Olympics. A total of 15 spots, each 15 seconds in length, were created, all with nonsensical titles, such as ‘‘Entangled Nine-Year-Olds’’ and ‘‘Extreme Nurses.’’ The spots depicted their amusingly named groups just long enough for the viewer to understand the title. One spot, ‘‘Envious Nomads,’’ showed two dusty, travel-worn nomads standing with a camel on a sidewalk. The outof-place male nomad snacked on Emerald Nuts while admiring a typical suburban house and yard. The voiceover ending the spot explained that ‘‘Envious Nomads love Emerald Nuts.’’
To compensate for the campaign’s limited budget, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners purposely created short television spots. They were then placed as ‘‘bookends’’ on commercial breaks, with one spot airing at the beginning and one at the end of the break. ‘‘As a result, we get tickled by the first spot and afterward, given a minute or two to ponder it, we’re hit with a second spot straight away to cement the brand name in our minds,’’ ad critic Seth Stevenson explained on National Public Radio. The television spots primarily focused on brand awareness, and Diamond was criticized for not explaining why consumers should pick their nuts over Planters’. Diamond executives, however, boasted positive results after the campaign’s 2004 beginning. ‘‘We saw an active response at shelf level and we just had a flood of consumer e-mail that showed a very, very strong response to the campaign and the product,’’ McBride told the Record. The campaign’s boldest move occurred in early 2005, when Diamond placed a majority of its budget into one 30-second nationwide television commercial to be aired during the Super Bowl. The spot deviated from the previous ‘‘E.N.’’ format, showing a father snacking on Emerald Nuts next to his daughter. When the daughter asked, ‘‘Daddy, can I have some Emerald Nuts?’’ her father replied, ‘‘Honey, if you eat an Emerald Nut, unicorns will disappear forever.’’ A talking unicorn, Santa Claus, and even the Easter Bunny sequentially appeared to admonish the father for lying. The spot ended with the text, ‘‘They’re kind of hard to share.’’ According to a Diamond spokesperson, the Super Bowl spot was discounted from $2.4 million to $2 million because of its fourth-quarter game placement. Diamond scored, however, when the fourth quarter became the second-most-watched segment of the game as the losing team rallied during the final minutes. Most of the campaign’s television spots, along with deleted scenes, were posted on the brand’s website, http://www.emeraldnuts.com.

OUTCOME
The primary objective of the ‘‘Emerald Nuts Marketing Campaign’’ was to establish brand awareness of Emerald Nuts at a national level. Diamond quickly met with success at the local level. Just a few months after the campaign launched, an early campaign survey showed that 77 percent of Northern Californians recognized the Emerald Nuts brand. By July sales for Diamond were $50 million above the previous financial year’s sales. The company took a big risk by sinking a majority of its 2005 advertising budget into one 30-second Super Bowl commercial. Grant Pace, creative director at ad agency Conover Tuttle Pace, which created Budweiser’s ‘‘Bud Bowl’’ Super Bowl campaign, approved of the strategy, saying to the Boston Globe, ‘‘People aren’t going to think hard about it . . . What you want is for people to see you in the store and think, ‘I saw these guys on Super Bowl. It must be pretty decent stuff.’ ’’ Diamond was pleased with the results of its Super Bowl advertising. The Monday after the game, the Emerald Nuts website reported 24,308 unique visitors, significantly more than the 1,182 average-per-day reported during the previous October. Sales after the Super Bowl increased 56.3 percent between February and April.

YOU’RE NOT AS CLEAN AS YOU THINK CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
In 2001 Dial, the Dial Corporation’s mainstay brand in the soap market for more than 50 years, was the only brand with an all-antibacterial line of products. The challenge in promoting it was that focus-group research showed that many consumers did not think they needed their soap to be antibacterial. In its maiden voyage as Dial’s ad agency, Austin, Texas–based GSD&M came up with a high-impact national TV campaign called ‘‘You’re Not as Clean as You Think.’’ With the goal of increasing sales by reinvigorating the public’s interest in the brand’s soaps and body washes, the campaign was released in January 2002.
GSD&M created two television commercials to kick off the campaign, which had a budget of somewhere between $18 and $25 million. The effort not only used the tagline ‘‘You’re not as clean as you think,’’ but also resurrected the slogan ‘‘Aren’t you glad you use Dial?’’ One spot began with a close-up, from a toilet bowl’s point of view, of a thirsty dog lapping up a drink of toilet water. The dog’s owner then arrived home to have her face licked enthusiastically by the pooch. This spot, as well as a second one that took place in a gym locker room and featured an inadvertently shared towel, employed grossout humor. They were, however, constructed carefully to keep the message up front and offense to a minimum. The campaign hit its mark. Sales of Dial-brand products increased 5 percent in the first half of 2003, placing the company more solidly in the number two position behind Dove’s Unilever. USA Today’s Ad Track polls in 2003 showed good numbers for the Dial commercials, particularly with regard to women, an audience Dial had hoped to woo. Dial retained the ‘‘You’re Not as Clean as You Think’’ theme in 2004, using it in a crosspromotion with the movie Shrek 2, a partnership that the company described as successful.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Dial Corporation’s signature brand was established in the mid-1940s, when meatpacker Armour & Company developed an unlikely new product, deodorant soap. It named the new soap ‘‘Dial’’ to underscore claims that the product supplied 24-hour protection from odors caused by bacteria. The soap was introduced in 1948 with a fullpage advertisement in the Chicago Tribune that featured a unique attention-getting element: it was printed with scented ink. Dial soap was an instant hit, and by the 1950s it had become the best-selling deodorant soap in the United States. In 1953 the company’s famous advertising slogan, ‘‘Aren’t you glad you use Dial? Don’t you wish everybody did?’’ was born.
The Dial brand was expanded beyond soap to include other deodorant products and shaving creams. In 1970 the brand was passed from one unusual corporate parent to another when Canadian bus company Greyhound bought Armour and moved the company to a new headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, under the moniker Armour-Dial. In 1987 the bus line was sold off. Two years later Liquid Dial soap, the first antibacterial soap of its kind, was introduced. The product was so well received that it spawned many imitators. In 1991 the company took the name of its best-known brand and became the Dial Corporation.
The Dial Corporation struggled in the 1990s, as competition increased and sales flattened. In the late 1990s it employed a campaign themed ‘‘Doesn’t That Feel Better.’’ The TV spots were created by agency DDB Worldwide, a subsidiary of the advertising conglomerate the Omnicom Group. Set to Judy Garland’s rendition of ‘‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’’ the spot was composed of black-and-white images of a child washing with the bar soap. The voice-over said, ‘‘You can get there and feel clean, healthy, restored,’’ and then followed with the tagline ‘‘Doesn’t that feel better?’’ The campaign garnered little attention and failed to make any sales breakthroughs. When Herb Baum, formerly of Hasbro and Quaker State, took the reigns as CEO of Dial in fall 2000, his task was to streamline the operation in preparation for a change of ownership that was planned to take place in 2004, when Dial would become a subsidiary of the German consumer-products company Henkel KGaA. Austin, Texas–based agency GSD&M Advertising, which, like DDB, was part of the Omnicom Group, won the $18 to $25 million Dial Corp. account in June 2001. The maverick agency developed a campaign that made consumers and industry observers take notice and that in the process even managed to reinvigorate the old slogan ‘‘Aren’t you glad you use Dial?’’

TARGET MARKET
Young mothers and other young bacteria-conscious consumers were the focus of the new ‘‘You’re Not as Clean as You Think’’ campaign. ‘‘We have a 40-plus group that has been very loyal,’’ explained Steve Tooker, general manager of Dial’s personal care division, in a 2003 USA Today article. ‘‘They grew up with ‘Aren’t you glad you use Dial?’ What we were missing along the way was picking up the younger group and the younger mom.’’ GSD&M’s memorable TV spots had to walk a fine line between funny and too gross. Male audiences would appreciate the bathroom humor, but the commercials also needed to avoid offending young female household buyers, in whom Dial wanted to instill concern regarding unseen dirt and bacteria. Focus groups revealed that the widely recognized gold bar of Dial soap was often thought of as a masculine product. The company felt that the TV spots’ shock factor communicated the idea that their soap was essential for cleaning as well as protection and would resonate with mothers in particular. Although Dial asserted that it was not trying to make the brand more youthful, in 2004 it chose a kids’ movie, Shrek 2, the sequel to the hugely successful animated feature about an ogre named Shrek, for the brand’s first movie promotion. TV spots featured the characters from the film demonstrating the theme ‘‘You’re Not as Clean as You Think.’’ These spots may have been aimed at moms and tots alike, but the packaging, which included a limited-edition ogre-shaped dispenser, was clearly meant to appeal to children’s purchasing influence on their parents.

COMPETITION
According to global research firm Mintel, from 2000 to 2003 more than 250 antibacterial products were available for sale in the North American market. Dial may have invented the antibacterial segment, but by 2002 it was running second in the $950 million bar-soap category as a whole. At 16 percent it was well behind the 25 percent share boasted by Unilever’s Dove soap. Those figures, compiled by market-information firm Information Resources, Inc., omitted Wal-Mart, a significant Dial retailer, but there was still cause for concern. Research company TNS CMR reported that Dove was outspending Dial as well. In the first nine months of 2001 Dove’s media spending was $29 million, compared to $11.5 million for Dial.
A number of other soap manufacturers served as challengers to Dial’s variety of personal-cleansing products. Colgate-Palmolive’s Irish Spring bar and Softsoap liquid were top sellers in the late 1990s and the first few years of the new millennium. With longstanding loyalty among consumers, conglomerate Procter & Gamble’s Ivory and Safeguard brands were formidable competitors as well. By 2001 the glut of competitors had forced the midsize Dial Corp. to set itself apart by getting creative in a normally unexciting advertising category.

MARKETING STRATEGY
In 2001 Dial was unique in that it was the only brand with an all-antibacterial line, but research showed that many consumers did not think that they needed their soap to be antibacterial. Rich Tlapek, a vice president and group creative director at GSD&M, described the dilemma in a 2002 issue of Advertising Age. ‘‘In focus groups, people would all say they thought they were clean or clean enough. That left us in a difficult situation of how do we increase the relevance [of the antibacterial position] if people think they’re already clean?’’ GSD&M won the Dial account in 2001 with a plan to use highimpact TV spots that would remind consumers just how germ-ridden they might be on any given day. The budget for ‘‘You’re Not as Clean as You Think’’ was reported to be between $18 million and $25 million, with almost half of it spent on testing the campaign in order to ensure efficacy once it was released in January 2002. Two 30-second TV commercials ran on prime-time network and cable channels, primarily during sitcoms but also during some morning shows. The first spot opened with a close-up of a thirsty dog enjoying a drink from a toilet. Upon hearing the arrival of his owner, the dog ran downstairs to greet her with an enthusiastic face licking. The second spot took place in a gym locker room. A sweaty man wiped not only his armpits but also his privates with a towel and then replaced it where he had found it. A second man, who had just come from the sauna, took the same towel to dry his face. Both spots were capped off with a voice-over saying, ‘‘You’re not as clean as you think,’’ which was then followed by Dial’s old slogan, ‘‘Aren’t you glad you use Dial?’’ Dial and GSD&M were aware that they ran the risk of turning people off. ‘‘We definitely don’t want to be in the fear-mongering business,’’ said Bill Puentes, director ofmarketing at Dial, to Advertising Age. ‘‘That’s why we took a humorous approach.’’ The goals of the campaign were to grab consumers’ attention, communicate why people needed Dial products, and reinforce the brand’s national presence. The spots were designed to hook viewers with likable yet cutting-edge content while also maximizing brand recognition by drawing upon Dial’s advertising heritage. Other spots followed in 2003, expanding on the same theme. In one a man in a pool heard the boy swimming next to him tell his mother that he no longer needed to use the restroom. Another spot showed a bus that had been transporting nudists to a retreat; after it dropped them off, it changed its sign and took on riders for a garden tour—without a cleaning in between. Bolstered by the success of the campaign, Dial undertook its first movie cross-promotion, forging an affiliation with the 2004 animated film Shrek 2. TV spots featured the lovable but not-too-tidy cartoon ogre Shrek extracting wax from his ear; the substance was later mistaken by his friend, Donkey, for hair gel. The tagline remained essentially the same: ‘‘You’re not as clean as you think you are.’’ During the movie’s highly successful run Dial sold Shrek-themed products, including bottles of Liquid Dial featuring pumps shaped like Shrek and Donkey and ogre-apple scented body wash.

OUTCOME
The Dial Corporation and GSD&M had a winner with ‘‘You’re Not as Clean as You Think.’’ Brand sales grew 5 percent in the first half of 2003, and the company gained ground on market-share leader Unilever. The campaign received positive press from both ad-industry publications and the mainstream media, and consumer brand awareness increased. USA Today ’s Ad Track poll reported good numbers for the commercials in 2003. The newspaper surveyed those familiar with the campaign, and 25 percent of these respondents said that they liked the spots ‘‘a lot,’’ which was above the Ad Track average of 21 percent. Perhaps more important was the fact that 26 percent of women, a key target of the campaign, liked the commercials ‘‘a lot.’’ In an August 2004 issue of USA Today, Tom Ennis, Dial’s director of marketing, said that the Shrek 2 cross-promotion was good for the movie studio as well as Dial, stating that the promotion had ‘‘overachieved its sales estimates.’’

ALWAYS OUT THERE CAMPAIGN

OVERVIEW
By repositioning Dial-A-Mattress, a seemingly fly-by-night operation with B-grade commercials, as a company on the cutting edge of so-called anti-advertising, the ‘‘Always Out There’’ campaign demonstrated the importance of taking chances. Dial-A-Mattress first took a chance by hiring Dweck & Campbell in New York, a young agency with a penchant for guerilla marketing, such as spray painting brand names on Manhattan sidewalks, to handle most aspects of the makeover. Dweck, in turn, took a chance by selecting 30-year-old John O’Hagan to direct the three introductory commercials in the campaign. Hagen, a 1996 graduate of New York University Film School, had directed an award-winning documentary for his thesis but no television spots. Dweck, which had very strong creative people but no staff producer, according to 31-one-year-old producer Larry Shanet, took a further chance by hiring Shanet to produce the spots, his first freelance assignment after working for four years at Siquis Ltd. in Baltimore. This willingness to take risks culminated in a series of three 30-second television spots described as ‘‘very odd’’ and even ‘‘demented,’’ terms that translated into compliments in the contemporary advertising lexicon. Dweck mirrored the atmosphere of the commercials with oddball marketing tactics, such as advertising on carryout pizza boxes and Chinese take-home cartons. The campaign also initiated a number of changes that transformed the face that Dial-A-Mattress presented to the public, including a script for its customer service representatives to use when fielding orders over the telephone, new uniforms for its delivery people, and a redesigned company logo that was painted on the sideboards of its truck fleet.
The commercials introduced these changes by following the misadventures of two imperturbable deliverymen as they deposited mattresses in the households of customers who revealed themselves to be very strange.
‘‘Arctic Ground Squirrel’’ featured a man in a squirrel costume who intended to hibernate all winter in his basement; ‘‘Wrestlers’’ featured a husband-and-wife team re-creating the antics of pro wrestlers; and ‘‘Wannabe’’ featured a uniform freak who dressed up in a Dial-AMattress uniform. The spots generated humor by focusing on the contrast between the eccentricity of the customers and the unflappability of the deliverymen, who seemed to have seen it all.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Dweck & Campbell president Michael Dweck described his client Dial-A-Mattress succinctly: ‘‘It’s the FedEx of mattress companies.’’ More precisely, Dial-A-Mattress amounted to a marriage of a phone-order catalog company and an overnight delivery service. Customers phoned in an order to Dial-A-Mattress, and then one of the company’s delivery trucks, which were on the road 24 hours a day, arrived at the customer’s home with a choice of three mattresses to compare. The ultimate resting place of the product—the customer’s own bedroom—thus served, quite appropriately, as the showroom. In 1999 an article in Advertising Age pointed out that ‘‘prior to [the ‘Always Out There’] campaign, Dial-AMattress was known in the New York area for painfully bad TV spots.’’ In fact, the constraints of advertising budgets across the bedding category created a genre of advertising so uniformly awful that it generated a subgenre of ads that parodied the stereotypical bedding commercials. So Dial-A-Mattress was well positioned to use parody in its advertising, provided it could find an agency attuned to the subtleties of irony but willing to work on a low-budget, regional account.
Dweck & Campbell fit the bill perfectly—the start-up shop’s first account in 1992 revitalized New Jersey-based Giant Carpet with a series of 30-second commercials, aired on Saturday Night Live, that cost about $1,000 each to produce. Mining the same vein of presidential mockery as SNL cast member Dana Carvey’s impersonation of George Bush, the commercials recast the cut-rate carpet retailer from cheesy to hip. By 1997 the agency, founded by Dweck and vice president/ creative director Lori Campbell, collected billings estimated at $20million from clients such as Pepsi, TimeWarner, and Seagram’s. Servicing these staid names earned Dweck inflated clout and budgets, but the shop maintained its cutting-edge reputation by continuing to take risks. After seeing the story boards for the Dial-A-Mattress campaign, about 150 directors sent in reels from respected companies such as bicoastal Harmony Pictures and the bicoastal/international firm Propaganda. From these Dweck chose O’Hagan on the endorsement of Bryan Buckley, a partner at Hungry Man production company, which was in the process of signing the young director. Buckley backed the rookie by agreeing to codirect the spots; while Buckley showed up on the sets daily, he allowed the young director to take the reins of the production. Even without Buckley’s recommendation, O’Hagan’s work spoke for itself, as his student film Wonderland, which documented the eccentric inhabitants of Levittown, New York, had won the 1997 Cable Ace Award as well as a nomination for O’Hagan as the best director at the DGA Awards.
O’Hagan, a Brown University graduate who was born in Dublin, Ireland, but grew up in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., listed photographers Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Bill Owens as well as fiction-writer Flannery O’Connor as his prime artistic influences. ‘‘They all have a way of capturing the absurd and the poetic in the everyday,’’ O’Hagan said in an article by Scott Jones in a 1998 issue of Shoot. Dweck sought a director who could similarly capture the absurd and the poetic in the everyday, hence the choice to chance a newcomer. O’Hagan captured the absurdity of the everyday by allowing his actors enough room to spontaneously create genuine moments where they were guided less by the script or the director’s instructions than by their own intuition of the natural flow of the situation. ‘‘I don’t tell [the actors] how they have to say it or that they have to hit all the words on the line,’’ O’Hagan commented in Jones’s article. ‘‘They can put their spin on it, direct it, keeping it as real and spontaneous as possible.’’ The key was to get his actors ‘‘to a place where they try things, where they aren’t just saying things they think you want them to say,’’ O’Hagan continued.

TARGET MARKET
Consumers in the regional area targeted by Dial-AMattress were familiar with the name of the company, but they were not aware of its unique selling process. ‘‘With Dial-A-Mattress, we did studies and found out that people who didn’t buy from them knew the company well—through 10 years of advertising—but didn’t know where the mattresses came from,’’ said Dweck in a 1998 Shoot article by Richard Linnett. ‘‘They didn’t see any outlets, no salesmen,’’ he continued. Part of Dweck’s challenge consisted of educating the consumers about the process, so the commercials portrayed it, focusing on the deliverymen who visited customers’ homes with the products. The spots also featured exaggerated versions of the target audience. By depicting customers who were unusual, Dial-A-Mattress identified its customers as individualistic. By exaggerating the quirkiness of the portrayals, the spots set consumers’ minds at ease by assuring them that the deliverymen would not consider them weird, as they had probably seen even stranger behavior.

COMPETITION
The ‘‘Always Out There’’ campaign was a direct reaction to a decline in sales at Dial-A-Mattress as a result of increased competition from Sleepy’s, another regional bedding retailer that followed the traditional strategy of wooing customers into showrooms. Dial-A-Mattress also competed against department stores, which maintained showroom displays that captured the attention of customers who were not even shopping specifically for bedding. Dial-A-Mattress distinguished itself, however, as the only retailer that delivered the bed to its future setting as a part of the selling process, allowing for a purchasing experience tailored to the individual.

MARKETING STRATEGY
Dweck & Campbell took on the responsibility for a complete overhaul of Dial-A-Mattress with the understanding that greater visibility with a revamped image would require changes in the company itself. Market research revealed that consumers were wary of a retailer with no showroom and no tangible structure upon which to pin an image. ‘‘We had to build trust,’’ recounted Dweck in Linnett’s article. ‘‘So we said, let’s redesign the trust. What [Dial-A-Mattress operators] say when customers call, how they say it, how [customers are] treated after the purchase—we’ll control that whole cycle. And then there’s radio ads, there’s outdoor; we’re creating wardrobe, too, [and] we designed their uniforms.’’ The ‘‘Wannabe’’ spot highlighted the new uniforms, as the commercial centered around a customer with a uniform fetish. In an odd twist, the customer greeted the deliverymen dressed exactly as they were, and the wanna-be joined them in unloading the mattress. While displaying the screwball humor of the other ads in the campaign, this spot also paved the way for the shift to new uniforms. ‘‘Of course, we don’t want people to think this is a weird transition, an overnight transformation, like if the post office suddenly showed up with bright orange trucks,’’ Dweck observed. ‘‘You’d say, ‘What’s up? What’d you do with my mail?’ We want to make the transition nice and smooth, but fast, too.’’ Dweck & Campbell used existing ad space as well to support the transition. Dial-A-Mattress maintained a fleet of ‘‘50 trucks that are always out there,’’ Campbell pointed out. ‘‘So we are using them as billboards and a way of introducing their new logo—‘Always Out There.’ ’’ The new logo highlighted not only the pervasiveness of Dial-A-Mattress delivery trucks and the availability of its telephone operators but also the ‘‘out there’’ quirkiness of the new campaign and the company’s attitude more generally. The two other spots accentuated this message. ‘‘Wrestlers’’ featured a suburban couple garbed in outlandish wrestling outfits. ‘‘Honey, it’s here,’’ the husband announced as the deliverymen appeared with the mattress. The wife proceeded to pin her husband on the mat and then kick him in the groin. ‘‘What’s wrong?’’ she inquired lovingly, before continuing to thrash him. The two deliverymen shrugged off the couple’s actions as commonplace, everyday behavior. ‘‘Arctic Ground Squirrel’’ exaggerated the absurdity of the situation. In this spot, a man greeted the deliverymen in a squirrel costume, acting out his identification with the rodent who wanted to hibernate, although he had not yet been able to do so because he was too busy cleaning the gutters and roof. The costumed man escorted the deliverymen to his den in the basement and informed them that ‘‘Anybody with half a brain knows an Arctic ground squirrel is down by now.’’ The spot hinted at the reason behind his desire to burrow into the ground when his wife upstairs began loudly berating him through basement ceiling. The man tried to enlist the sympathy of the deliverymen, but all they offered was a clipboard to sign for his delivery. The impassive demeanor of the deliverymen provided both the humor and the sales pitch: these guys did not deliver therapy or interpretation or even reaction—all they delivered were mattresses.

OUTCOME
Dweck & Campbell believed in the maxim that word-ofmouth advertising worked best of all. So they targeted their advertising at triggering discussion from its audience. It pleased O’Hagan to overhear random strangers quoting his spots, confirming that the commercial had made a memorable impression on them. ‘‘Right after [‘Arctic Ground Squirrel’] came out, I overheard some guys on the subway telling each other to ‘Shut your piehole!’ ’’ O’Hagan recalled in Jones’s article in Shoot. ‘‘It felt good to do something that people were responding to,’’ he continued. O’Hagan designed his films to elicit responses from his audience by leaving them open to interpretation, by not spelling out the meaning of his message: ‘‘If you’re just shoving things down people’s throats, there’s nothing for them to talk about . . . I like to give the audience more credit than that. People do pick up on the subtleties. They enjoy them.’’ The ‘‘Always Out There’’ campaign generated much talk value in these terms.
Shoot magazine’s Linnett called the ‘‘Arctic Ground Squirrel’’ spot ‘‘magnificently absurd.’’ He expressed reservations about the ‘‘Wrestlers’’ spot after viewing a rough cut at MacKenzie Cutler, a postproduction boutique in the revitalized Flatiron district of Manhattan, where Dave Coza edited the films. ‘‘Although it’s a funny concept, the piece at this stage begs less fight and more personality,’’ stated Linnett. The addition of the wife’s fleeting concern for her husband injected personality into the spot. ‘‘That one plaintive moment captures her character and gives the entire spot a sense of texture and personality,’’ Linnett pronounced.
Advertising Age, in its May 31, 1999, ad review, called the ‘‘Arctic Ground Squirrel’’ spot a success. ‘‘The unexpected nature of the spot and others in the campaign, along with the genuinely funny executions, helped drive Dial sales up significantly.’’ ‘‘Arctic Ground Squirrel’’ won a coveted Gold Lion in the retail category at the 1998 Cannes International Advertising Festival. A year later the spot picked up a Gold Clio in the Home Furnishings/Appliances category and a bronze medal in the Consumer Television under $50,000 Budget category at the twenty-third annual One Show Awards held in New York City’s Lincoln Center. In August 1998, however, Dweck & Campbell resigned the $5 million account, even though the agency was producing award-winning work on the campaign. Dweck explained in an article in Advertising Age that ‘‘philosophical differences over direction’’ forced him to resign the account. Although the ‘‘Always Out There’’ campaign was short-lived, it gained attention from the critical community of the advertising field as well as the attention of everyday consumers.